Grant Gibbons is clearly, like all of the Island’s politicians, in election mode right now. Newly appointed as Shadow Education Minister, he has a lot to say about how he would improve Bermuda’s in-crisis public school system — and plenty of blame to lay at the door of the current Government.

His new portfolio was officially announced by his party leader on the same day earlier this month that Professor David Hopkins and his team of education experts delivered a damning report on school standards.

That document, as Government conceded, encapsulated what everyone on the Island already knew: that pupils in the public school system, the majority of them black, had been badly let down for years. Dr. Gibbons will not — unlike his portfolio predecessor Neville Darrell — accept any suggestion that the Opposition played its part in creating the problem.

Asked if he believes the United Bermuda Party’s decision to introduce middle schools — cited as a bad move in the Hopkins report — was ultimately disastrous, the 54-year-old deputy chairman of Colonial Insurance shakes his head. “There was nobody saying we shouldn’t do middle schools,” he says.

“The PLP? They were supportive of the process. For those that say the PLP inherited a mess — that’s nonsense. I think what the PLP inherited was a school system that was changing. A lot of those changes were taking place.

“There were a lot of things that were put into place from about the early ‘90s until about ‘98. When you have got a system that was in change you have to be vigilant. One of the things that they were not doing as ministers was paying... close attention to the fact that the school system was undergoing change.”

His two sons — now aged 19 and 21 — reached school age in the early 1990s when the UBP was in power. So did Dr. Gibbons feel the public school system back then was good enough for them, after almost 30 years of his party in Government?

“My children did not go to public schools because like a lot of parents I wanted to make sure they had the best possible education,” he says.

“There were a lot of changes going on in Government schools and quite frankly my children went to some of the schools that I and my family went to. I think a parent wants to give their child the best possible education and I think there are a lot of parents right now who are really scrimping and saving to be able to send their children to private school because they know there are problems with the education system. In the same way, I think that my wife and I wanted the best.”

Wasn’t it the best under the UBP? “No,” he admits. “I think by and large the public education system doesn’t do as well as the private system. There are probably lots of reasons for that. Also one of my children at the time was ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder). We had to make sure that a lot of his needs were addressed.”

As one might expect of a man hoping to see his party gain power in the coming months, Dr. Gibbons is relentless in his criticism of Government. “Disgraceful”, “inexcusable”, and “unacceptable” are just a few of the adjectives which pepper his summing up of the Progressive Labour Party’s handling of public schools for the past nine years.

The Government’s attempt to now find a solution - at a cost of almost $250,000, as Dr. Gibbons is quick to point out — has been mishandled, he claims.

He describes Professor Hopkins as a “hatchet person” brought in from the UK to deliver bad news and says: “In the process they have pointed fingers at everybody. That’s not a way to get the reform done. If you drop a bomb on a system then it’s very difficult to ask the survivors to continue doing what they are doing and put in a lot of change and expect them to be comfortable and co-operative.

“The report has essentially vilified the (Education) Ministry. It’s accused principals and teachers of not doing their jobs. If you are going to implement change you need goodwill.”

Asked what he would have done if faced with the problem of more than half the Island’s senior school students failing to graduate, he replies: “I don’t think we would have got to this.”

He adds: “Clearly we have a system in crisis. The first thing you need to do is go back and re-establish connections with the very people that have to make the system work on a day-to-day basis. I don’t think anybody disagrees that there are some teachers, some principals and some people in the Ministry that would probably be better off retiring.”

For all his focus on the negative, Dr. Gibbons is equally brimming with positive ideas for change — and he has clearly done his research. A recent vacation in New York saw him spend a morning with Joel Klein, chancellor of the New York City Department of Education, to find out how standards are being raised in the the largest public school system in the US.

He discovered — to no great surprise — that quality of teaching was the key. It’s this he believes needs to be addressed immediately in Bermuda.

“Unless you have got good teachers everything is lost,” he says. “We have all heard that the quality of teaching should be a lot better. It’s a question of taking the teachers you have and have them going through continuing education, every year going through assessment and giving them the kind of training they need to be turned from okay teachers to teachers that are really good.”

He would introduce a raft of measures to raise standards, many of which tie in with recommendations made last fall by the Association of School Principals, such as aligning the curriculum across all schools and introducing regular testing on exactly what is being taught in the classroom. Dr. Gibbons, who taught briefly at a secondary school in the States and for five years at Harvard University, would publish test results, effectively creating a league table of schools, create an independent inspectorate to assess standards and focus much more on the quality of pre-school education.

He’d also review teachers’ salaries, implement a technical education curriculum from the middle school level, place power back with principals, ensure every school had an active board of governors and lengthen school days, so that more sport, drama, music and art could be taught.

Dr. Gibbons says Bermuda probably has the lowest teacher to student ratio in the world (1:7) and spends almost double on public schools now what it did a decade ago ($66 million a year in 1998 to $117 million this year). But none of it has translated into results.

“I think there’s a lot of embarrassment, quite frankly, out there,” he says. “Unfortunately I think a lot of the principals and teachers and the Ministry are feeling guilty. But the embarrassment should be at the Government level.”

He disputes the suggestion that his own privileged background — he went to the fee-paying Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, then studied at Brown and Oxford universities before doing his PhD in organic chemistry at Harvard — prohibits him from being able to engage with public school students, parents and staff.

“I was educated in some of the best schools in the world and why shouldn’t Bermudian parents aspire to that?” he says. “Does that make me any less capable? When Government wants to be divisive these are the kind of accusations it makes. I think the type of people you want to take on a challenge of this sort are ones who are well educated.”

Asked if he needed time to lick his wounds after being ousted as UBP leader in January 2006, he answers frankly. “I think you do. We are all human and basically my colleagues said ‘we no longer want you as leader’. I think it’s human nature to say ‘well okay... if you don’t want me at the centre of things anymore then I’m going to sit back and assess where we are’.”